When you want to sell something on social media, one of the key aspects to achieve success is being able to effectively reach your potential customers. The problem is that in social networks, there are many people with all kinds of tastes and preferences, and it can be difficult to find that specific group of people who are really interested in your product/service.
In order to effectively find and reach your potential customers, you need to understand the behavior of your prospects when they’re online, and how this relates to their preferences to buy a specific product/service. That’s the objective of behavioral marketing.
Define your target market
Behavioral marketing uses techniques to obtain information from potential customers when they’re online. This data might include: where they spend most of their time online or what are their specific interests, for example.
The above is mainly done thanks to modern information technologies like web analytics, cookies, and browsing history, just to name a few.
Social networks also have powerful tools that allow you to analyze — and even “shape”, a series of parameters to easily and precisely define your target market like:
- Age
- Sex
- Language
- Location
- Purchasing power
- Preferences
In this way, you can know first-hand, who interacts with your brand and how they do it. The objective is to make it easier to create individual user profiles that you can later clearly group and define as homogeneous market segments. In this way, you can then target these segments for your social media ad campaigns in a more efficient way.
You can also apply a similar tactic to analyze your competition, which will give you a broader view of the market. Buzzsumo, for example, is a powerful tool you can use for this, and you can also find more interesting marketing tools here.
Connect with your audience
Another excellent way to understand the behavior of your prospects is to communicate with them, not to them. For this, look at what people share and what they talk about on social media. Find out which of your posts on social media attract the most comments.
Use this to create a strategy to “engage”, introducing content or conversations that may interest your audience. Try by asking them direct questions like what they think about a particular topic, or what they’re looking for on social networks.
The power of understanding “how” and “why” your prospects buy what they buy
In behavioral marketing, a key element to success is to understand what aspects of your target customer’s personality (values, opinions, emotions, etc), and what context around them, motivate them to buy from one brand over another. Your objective must be to determine how consumers relate to your brand in terms of perception, usage, and experience.
What is the emotional content they relate to your brand, and why. It could be something related to quality, the time your brand has in the market, or something of specific value they find only in your brand.
Observing and understanding the interaction that consumers have with your brand — and also with other brands, can help you a lot to define your own style and differentiate yourself from the competition, offering something of value that better meets the specific needs of your target customers and consequently, motivate them to buy from you.
